Business Intelligence for Midsize Businesses

Business intelligence is one of those phrases that everyone agrees is something all organizations, regardless of their size, should be doing.  After all, no organization would admit to doing business stupidity.  Nor, I presume, would any vendor admit to selling it.

But not everyone seems to agree on what the phrase means.  Personally, I have always defined business intelligence as the data analytics performed in support of making informed business decisions (i.e., for me, business intelligence = decision support).

Oftentimes, this analytics is performed on data integrated, cleansed, and consolidated into a repository (e.g., a data warehouse).  Other times, it’s performed on a single data set (e.g., a customer information file).  Either way, business decision makers interact with the analytical results via static reports, data visualizations, dynamic dashboards, and ad hoc querying and reporting tools.

But robust business intelligence and analytics solutions used to be perceived as something only implemented by big businesses, as evinced in the big price tags usually associated with them.  However, free and open source software, cloud computing, mobile, social, and a variety of as-a-service technologies drove the consumerization of IT, driving down the costs of solutions, enabling small and midsize businesses to afford them.  Additionally, the open data movement lead to a wealth of free public data sets that can be incorporated into business intelligence and analytics solutions (examples can be found at kdnuggets.com/datasets).

Lyndsay Wise, author of the insightful book Using Open Source Platforms for Business Intelligence (to listen to a podcast about the book, click here: OSBI on OCDQ Radio), recently blogged about business intelligence for small and midsize businesses.

Wise advised that “recent market changes have shifted the market in favor of small and midsize businesses.  Before this, most were limited by requirements for large infrastructures, high-cost licensing, and limited solution availability.  With this newly added flexibility and access to lower price points, business intelligence and analytics solutions are no longer out of reach.”

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

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The Big Datastillery

If you’re having trouble viewing this video, you can watch it on Vimeo by clicking on this link: The Big Datastillery on Vimeo

To view or download the infographic featured in the video, click on this direct link to its PDF: The Big Datastillery.pdf

This video was sponsored by the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this video are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

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Smart Big Data Adoption for Midsize Businesses

In a previous post, I explained that big data is not just for big businesses.  During a recent interview Ed Abrams discussed how mobile, social, and cloud are driving big data adoption among midsize businesses.

As Sharon Hurley Hall recently blogged, midsize businesses are adopting social for the simple reason “a significant proportion of your potential customers are online, and while there they could be buying your product or service.”  She also makes a great point about social adoption not being only externally focused.  “Social business technologies will improve internal communication and knowledge-sharing.  The result is a better-informed and more engaged workforce, and the technology gives the ability to harness creativity and implement innovation to increase your competitive advantage.”

“Becoming more social,” Hall concluded, “doesn’t mean that employees waste time online; in fact, it means that everyone is better informed about both data and strategy, leading to business benefits.  The combination of integrating social technologies to improve your operational efficiency and harnessing social data to boost your knowledge base means that your business can be more competitive and more profitable.”

Hall’s insights also exemplify the proper perspective for midsize businesses to use when adopting big data.  No business of any size should adopt big data just because everyone is talking about it, nor simply because they think it might help their business.

As with everything in the business world, you should seek first to understand what big data adoption can offer, and what kind of investment it requires, before making any type of commitment.  The best thing about big data for midsize businesses is that it provides a big list of possibilities.  But trying to embrace all of the possibilities of big data would be a big mistake.  Start small with big data.  Smart big data adoption for midsize businesses means starting with well-defined, business-enhancing opportunities.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.

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Big Data is not just for Big Businesses

“It is widely assumed that big data, which imbues a sense of grandiosity, is only for those large enterprises with enormous amounts of data and the dedicated IT staff to tackle it,” opens the recent article Big data: Why it matters to the midmarket.

Much of the noise generated these days about the big business potential of big data certainly seems to contain very little signal directed at small and midsize businesses.  Although it’s true that big businesses generate more data, faster, and in more varieties, a considerable amount of big data is externally generated, much of which is freely available for use by businesses of all sizes.

The easiest example is the poster child for leveraging big data — Google Search.  But there’s also a growing number of open data sources (e.g., weather data) and social data sources (e.g., Twitter), and, since more of the world is becoming directly digitized, more businesses are now using more data no matter how big they are.  Additionally, as Phil Simon wrote about in The New Small, the free and open source software, as-a-service, cloud, mobile, and social technology trends driving the consumerization of IT are enabling small and midsize businesses to, among other things, use more data and be more competitive with big businesses.

“Each minute of every day, information is produced about the activities of your business, your customers, and your industry,” explained Sarita Harbour in her recent blog post Harnessing Big Data: Giving Midsize Business a Competitive Edge.  “Hidden within this enormous amount of data are trends, patterns, and indicators that, if extracted and identified, can yield important information to make your business more efficient and more competitive, and ultimately, it can make you more money.”

However, the biggest driver of the misperception about big data is its over-identification with data volume.  Which is why earlier this year in his blog post It’s time for a new definition of big data, Robert Hillard used several examples to explain that big data refers more to big complexity than big volume.  While acknowledging that complex datasets tend to grow rapidly, thus making big data voluminous, his wonderfully pithy conclusion was that “big data can be very small and not all large datasets are big.”

Therefore, by extension we could say that the businesses using big data can be small, or mid-sized, and not all the businesses using big data are big.  But, of course, that’s not quite pithy enough.  So let’s simply say that big data is not just for big businesses.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Devising a Mobile Device Strategy

As I previously blogged in The Age of the Mobile Device, the disruptiveness of mobile devices to existing business models is difficult to overstate.  Mobile was also cited as one of the complementary technology forces, along with social and cloud, in the recent Harvard Business Review blog post by R “Ray” Wang about new business models being enabled by big data.

Since their disruptiveness to existing IT models is also difficult to overstate, this post ponders the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend that’s forcing businesses of all sizes to devise a mobile device strategy.  BYOD is often not about bringing your own device to the office, but about bringing your own device with you wherever you go (even though the downside of this untethered enterprise may be that our always precarious work-life balance surrenders to the pervasive work-is-life feeling mobile devices can enable).

In his recent InformationWeek article, BYOD: Why Mobile Device Management Isn’t Enough, Michael Davis observed that too many IT departments are not devising a mobile device strategy, but instead “they’re merely scrambling to meet pressure from the CEO on down to offer BYOD options or increase mobile app access.”  Davis also noted that when IT creates BYOD policies, they often to fail to acknowledge mobile devices have to be managed differently, partially since they are not owned by the company.

An alternative to BYOD, which Brian Proffitt recently blogged about, is Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE). “Plenty of IT departments see BYOD as a demon to be exorcised from the cubicle farms,” Proffitt explained, “or an opportunity to dump the responsibility for hardware upkeep on their internal customers.  The idea behind BYOD is to let end users choose the devices, programs, and services that best meet their personal and business needs, with access, support, and security supplied by the company IT department — often with subsidies for device purchases.”  Whereas the idea behind COPE is “the organization buys the device and still owns it, but the employee is allowed, within reason, to install the applications they want on the device.”

Whether you opt for BYOD or COPE, Information Management recently highlighted 5 Trouble Spots to consider, which included assuming that mobile device security is already taken care of by in-house security initiatives, data integration disconnects with on-premises data essentially turning mobile devices into mobile data silos, and the combination of personal and business data, which complicates, among other things, remote wiping the data on a mobile device in the event of a theft or security violation, which is why, as Davis concluded, managing the company data on the device is more important than managing the device itself.

With the complex business and IT challenges involved, how is your midsize business devising a mobile device strategy?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Social Business is more than Social Marketing

Although much of the early business use of social media was largely focused on broadcasting marketing messages at customers, social media transformed word of mouth into word of data and empowered customers to add their voice to marketing messages, forcing marketing to evolve from monologues to dialogues.  But is the business potential of social media limited to marketing?

During the MidMarket IBM Social Business #Futurecast, a panel discussion from earlier this month, Ed Brill, author of the forthcoming book Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager, defined the term social business as “an organization that engages employees in a socially-enabled process that brings together how employees interact with each other, partners, customers, and the marketplace.  It’s about bringing all the right people, both internally and externally, together in a conversation to solve problems, be innovative and responsive, and better understand marketplace dynamics.”

“Most midsize businesses today,” Laurie McCabe commented, “are still grappling with how to supplement traditional applications and tools with some of the newer social business tools.  Up until now, the focus has been on integrating social media into a lot of marketing communications, and we haven’t yet seen the integration of social media into other business processes.”

“Midsize businesses understand,” Handly Cameron remarked, “how important it is to get into social media, but they’re usually so focused on daily operations that they think that a social business is simply one that uses social media, and therefore they cite the facts that they created Twitter and Facebook accounts as proof that they are a social business, but again, they are focusing on external uses of social media and not internal uses such as improving employee collaboration.”

Collaboration was a common theme throughout the panel discussion.  Brill said a social business is one that has undergone the cultural transformation required to embrace the fact that it is a good idea to share knowledge.  McCabe remarked that the leadership of a social business rewards employees for sharing knowledge, not for hoarding knowledge.  She also emphasized the importance of culture before tools since simply giving individuals social tools will not automatically create a collaborative culture.

Cameron also noted how the widespread adoption of cloud computing and mobile devices is helping to drive the adoption of social tools for collaboration, and helping to break down a lot of the traditional boundaries to knowledge sharing, especially as more organizations are becoming less bounded by the physical proximity of their employees, partners, and customers.

From my perspective, even though marketing might have been how social media got in the front door of many organizations, social media has always been about knowledge sharing and collaboration.  And with mobile, cloud, and social technologies so integrated into our personal and professional lives, life and business are both more social and collaborative than ever before.  So, even if collaboration isn’t in the genes of your organization, it’s no longer possible to put the collaboration genie back in the bottle.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Barriers to Cloud Adoption

I previously blogged about leveraging the cloud for application development, noting as the cloud computing market matures we are seeing an increasing number of robust infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings that can accelerate new application development, as well as facilitate the migration of existing applications and data to the cloud.

A recent LinkedIn discussion about cloud computing asked whether small and midsize businesses (SMB) are embracing all that the cloud has to offer and, if not, then what are the most common barriers to cloud adoption.

“There is a lot of skepticism,” Sabharinath Bala noted, “about hosting apps and data in the cloud.  Not all SMBs are confident about cloud-based apps due to reasons ranging from data privacy and security to federal regulations.  I’ve seen quite a few SMBs embracing the cloud by hosting internal apps (payroll, HCM, etc.) in the cloud first and then moving on to apps that contain client confidential data.  In most cases, this is more of an exercise to build confidence about data security and privacy issues.”

Concern about data security and privacy issues is understandably the most commonly cited barrier to migrating applications, and the often sensitive data they contain, to the cloud.  This is why, as Steve O’Donnell commented, “commodity applications such as email, document management, and communications are being migrated first.  However, extremely critical applications such as CRM, ERP, and salesforce management are being adopted quickly as these really appeal to mobile workers.”

I have previously blogged about mobile devices being the biggest driver for cloud adoption since almost all mobile applications are based on a mobile-app-portal-to-the-cloud computing model.  Therefore, since without the cloud mobile devices can not be leveraged to their fullest potential, it is not surprising to see a high correlation between cloud adoption and mobile enablement.

Nor is it surprising to see that “the S in SMB is adopting the cloud faster than the M,” as Karthik Balachandran observed, “partially because the cloud has given smaller businesses access to IT assets that they did not have before.  But, larger businesses still enjoy returns from their traditional IT investments.  Call it legacy drag?”

Legacy drag is certainly a real concern, but another reason smaller firms may be migrating faster is because, as Karen Harrison commented, “companies with larger IT departments also feel a sense of loyalty to the people they have, and that also contributes to the lag.  In today’s economy, many companies don’t want to lay off workers who have been with them a long time.”

But lacking some of these legacy challenges facing larger businesses doesn’t necessarily mean that SMBs have an easier path to the cloud.  Although “there is no reason for your average SMB to not leverage what is available in the cloud to the fullest,” noted Fred McClimans, “realistically, this is not a technology issue, but rather a behavioral issue that goes well beyond the cloud: we’ve been conditioned to think that we have to physically own something to control it, keep it safe, or treat it as an asset.  Rather than focusing on owning assets, we need to get businesses to begin to think about leveraging assets.  And just like feeling comfortable with cloud-based applications, this is an educational/comfort issue.”

What other barriers to cloud adoption have you encountered in your organization?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Leveraging the Cloud for Application Development

For most of my career, I developed on-premises applications for the clients of enterprise software vendors.  Most of the time, effort, and money spent during the initial phases of those projects was allocated to setting up the application environments.

After the client purchased any missing (or upgraded existing) components of the required on-premises technology infrastructure, software had to be installed, hardware had to be configured, and disk space had to be allocated.  Then separate environments had to be established for development, testing, staging, and production, while setting up user accounts with the appropriate levels of access and security for each environment.  Finally, source control and provisioning procedures had to be implemented.

Therefore, a significant amount of time, effort, and money was expended before application development even began.  Of course, resources also had to be allocated to maintain these complex environments throughout the entire application lifecycle.

As the cloud computing market matures, we are seeing an increasing number of robust infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings, which can accelerate application development, especially for midsize businesses.

“The cloud offers immense advantages,” Steve Garone recently blogged, “in terms of agility and flexibility, making it easier, and if automation is employed, almost transparent to make assets available in real time when and where needed.  These advantages are valuable for midsize businesses because the resources and expertise needed to implement a fully automated cloud-based solution may not exist within a smaller IT staff used to managing a less complex environment.”  Nevertheless, Garone recommends a close examination of not just the benefits, but also the costs and, most important, the ROI associated with cloud-based solutions.

Leveraging the cloud for application development does have clear advantages.  However, application development environments are still complex to manage.  Even though most of that complexity will be conveniently concealed by the cloud, it will still exist.

Carefully investigate the security, scalability, and reliability of cloud service providers.  IaaS and PaaS have matured enough to be viable options for application development, but don’t allow the chance to jump-start your development cloud your judgment.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Cloud Computing for Midsize Businesses

OCDQ Radio is a vendor-neutral podcast about data quality and its related disciplines, produced and hosted by Jim Harris.

During this episode, Ed Abrams and I discuss cloud computing for midsize businesses, and, more specifically, we discuss aspects of the recently launched IBM global initiatives to help Managed Service Providers (MSP) deliver cloud-based service offerings.

Ed Abrams is the Vice President of Marketing, IBM Midmarket.  In this role, Ed is responsible for leading a diverse team that supports IBM’s business objectives with small and midsize businesses by developing, planning, and executing offerings and go-to-market strategies designed to help midsize businesses grow.  In this role Ed works closely and collaboratively with sales and channels teams, and agency partners to deliver high-quality and effective marketing strategies, offerings, and campaigns.

Cloud Computing for Midsize Businesses

Additional listening options:

• Click here to Download the MP3 file for this OCDQ Radio episode

• Click here to Subscribe to OCDQ Radio via iTunes

• Click here to Subscribe to OCDQ Radio via its RSS feed (non iTunes)

• Click here to Listen to OCDQ Radio on your Mobile with Stitcher SmartRadio

• Click here to Browse the OCDQ Radio Archives

This podcast was sponsored by the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Social Media Marketing: From Monologues to Dialogues

“With social media analytics,” Ed Abrams and Jay Hakami recently blogged, midsize businesses “can calculate the ROI and assess the effectiveness of their social media marketing campaigns by tracking both the actions of consumers and the influence of their top commenters and re-tweeters providing a level of insight on the individual never seen before . . . allowing them to make informed business decisions on how to best leverage their online presence.”

But perhaps the most challenging aspect for businesses trying to best leverage their online presence by using social media in their marketing campaigns is that it involves the presence of voices that they don’t have control over — their customers’ voices.

Social media has transformed word of mouth into word of data.  And, as more companies are being forced to acknowledge, the digital mouths of customers speak volumes.  Social media is empowering customers to add their voice to marketing messages.

“Everyone loves to talk about customers engaging with brands,” Rick Robinson recently blogged.  “But in the process, customers are also taking over brands.  The message for midsize firms is that they can no longer count on shaping the conversation.”

“Social media offers,” Dan Berthiaume recently blogged, “the opportunity to directly engage with customers for real-time feedback.  Social media marketing at its core is a relatively inexpensive and fast way of conducting marketing.”  True, however as Paul Gillin explained during our recent podcast discussion about social media for midsize businesses, the fundamental difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing is that the former is one-way, whereas the latter is two-way.

In other words, marketing has not historically looked to engage with customers to receive feedback.  Marketing has traditionally broadcasted messages at customers — and marketing’s early use of social media has been as just another broadcast channel.

However, “social media is a process of continual conversation,” Gillin explained.  “It’s a very different way to go about marketing, but the natural tendency for people when they see something new is to apply the old metaphors to it.  What you’ve seen during the first five years of social media’s popularity is a lot of use of these platforms as essentially the same old marketing channels.”

“We see more companies every year that are getting the idea that social media is a two-way conversation,” Gillin continued, “but it’s a difficult skill to develop.  Marketers are not taught in school or at work to converse — they’re taught to deliver messages.  So that’s turning around a pretty big battleship trying to convince and teach all these people the skills of two-way engagement.”

Marketing has long been accustomed to controlling a conversation that was never really a conversation — since marketers did all the talking, and customers could only listen or ignore them.  Social media is evolving marketing from monologues to dialogues.

Is your midsize business ready and, more importantly, willing to engage customers in an actual conversation?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Social Media for Midsize Businesses

OCDQ Radio is a vendor-neutral podcast about data quality and its related disciplines, produced and hosted by Jim Harris.

During this episode, Paul Gillin and I discuss social media for midsize businesses, including how the less marketing you do, the more effective you will be with social media marketing, the war of generosity, where the more you give, the more you get, and the importance of the trust equation, which means the more people trust you, the more they will want to do business with you.

Paul Gillin is a veteran technology journalist and a thought leader in new media.  Since 2005, he has advised marketers and business executives on strategies to optimize their use of social media and online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively.  He is a popular speaker who is known for his ability to simplify complex concepts using plain talk, anecdotes, and humor.

Paul Gillin is the author of four books about social marketing: The New Influencers (2007), Secrets of Social Media Marketing (2008), Social Marketing to the Business Customer (2011), co-authored with Eric Schwartzman, and the forthcoming book Attack of the Customers (2012), co-authored with Greg Gianforte.

Paul Gillin was previously the founding editor of TechTarget and editor-in-chief of Computerworld.  He writes a monthly column for BtoB magazine and is an active blogger and media commentator.  He has appeared as an expert commentator on CNN, PBS, Fox News, MSNBC, and other television outlets.  He has also been quoted or interviewed for hundreds of news and radio reports in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR, and the BBC.  Paul Gillin is a Senior Research Fellow and member of the board of directors at the Society for New Communications Research.

Social Media for Midsize Businesses

Additional listening options:

• Click here to Download the MP3 file for this OCDQ Radio episode

• Click here to Subscribe to OCDQ Radio via iTunes

• Click here to Subscribe to OCDQ Radio via its RSS feed (non iTunes)

• Click here to Listen to OCDQ Radio on your Mobile with Stitcher SmartRadio

• Click here to Browse the OCDQ Radio Archives

This podcast was sponsored by the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Cloud Computing is the New Nimbyism

NIMBY is an acronym for “Not In My Back Yard” and its derivative term Nimbyism usually refers to the philosophy of opposing construction projects or other new developments, which would be performed too close to your residence or your business, because even though those new developments could provide widespread benefits, they might just be a disruption to you.  So, for example, yes, please build that new airport or hospital or power plant that our city needs — just don’t build it too close to my back yard.

For a long time, midsize businesses viewed their information technology (IT) department as a Nimbyistic disruption, meaning that they viewed IT as a necessary cost of doing business, but one that also took up valuable space and time, and distracted their focus away from their core competencies, which, for most midsize businesses, are supported by but not directly related to IT.

Nowadays, cloud computing is providing a new — and far more positive — spin on Nimbyism by allowing midsize businesses to free up space in their back yard (where, in my experience, many midsize businesses keep their IT department) as well as free up their time to focus on mission-critical business activities by leveraging more cloud-based IT services, which also allows them to scale up their IT during peak business periods without requiring them to first spend time and money building a bigger back yard.

Shifting to a weather analogy, stratus clouds are characterized by horizontal layering with a uniform base, and nimbostratus clouds are stratus clouds of moderate vertical development, signifying the onset of steady, moderate to heavy, precipitation.

We could say cloud computing is the nimby-stratus IT clouds providing midsize businesses with a uniform base of IT services, which can quickly scale horizontally and/or vertically with the agility to adapt to best serve their evolving business needs.

The nimbleness of the new Nimbyism facilitated by cloud computing is providing another weather-related business insight that’s helping midsize businesses forecast a promising future, hopefully signifying the onset of steady, moderate to heavy, profitability.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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The Age of the Mobile Device

Bob Sutor recently blogged about mobile devices, noting that “the power of these gadgets isn’t in their touchscreens or their elegant design.  It’s in the variety of apps and communication services we can use on them to stay connected.  By thinking beyond the device, companies can prepare themselves and figure out how to make the most of this age of the mobile device.”

The disruptiveness of mobile devices to existing business models — even Internet-based ones — is difficult to overstate.  In fact, I believe the age of the mobile device will be even more disruptive than the age of the Internet, which, during the 1990s and early 2000s, disrupted entire industries and professions — the three most obvious examples being music, journalism, and publishing.

However, during those disruptions, mobile devices were in their nascent phase.  Laptops were still the dominant mobile devices and most mobile phones only made phone calls, though text messaging and e-mail soon followed.  It’s only been about five years — with the notable arrivals of the iPhone and the Kindle in 2007, the Android operating system in 2008, and the iPad in 2010 — since mobile devices started to hit their stride.  The widespread availability of connectivity options (Wi-Fi and 3G/4G broadband), the shift to more cloud-based services, and, as Sutor noted, in 2011, for the first time ever, shipments of smartphones exceeded total PC shipments, all appears to forecast that the age of the mobile device will be an age of massive — and rapid — disruption.

The IBM Midmarket white paper A Smarter Approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) notes that “mobile is becoming the customers’ preferred communications means for multiple channels.  As customers go mobile and sales teams strive to meet customers’ needs, midsize companies are enabling mobile CRM.  They are optimizing Web sites for wireless devices and deploying mobile apps directly linked into the contact centers.  They are purchasing apps for particular devices and are buying solutions that store CRM data on them when offline, and update the information when Internet access is restored.  This enables sales teams to quickly acquire customer histories and respond with offerings tailored to their desires.”

As Sutor concluded, “mobile devices are a springboard into the future, where the apps can significantly improve the quality of our personal or business lives by allowing us to do things we have never done before.”  I agree that mobile devices are a springboard into a future that allows us, as well as our businesses and our customers, to do things we have never done before.

The age of the mobile device is the future — and the future is now.  Is your midsize business ready?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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Big Data Lessons from Orbitz

One of the week’s interesting technology stories was On Orbitz, Mac Users Steered to Pricier Hotels, an article by Dana Mattioli in The Wall Street Journal, about how online travel company Orbitz used data mining to discover significant spending differences between their Mac and PC customers (who were identified by the operating system of the computer used to book reservations).

Orbitz discovered that Mac users are 40% more likely to book a four- or five-star hotel, and tend to stay in more expensive rooms, spending on average $20 to $30 more a night on hotels.  Based on this discovery, Orbitz has been experimenting with showing different hotel offers to Mac and PC visitors, ranking the more expensive hotels on the first page of search results for Mac users.

This Orbitz story is interesting because I think it provides two important lessons about big data for businesses of all sizes.

The first lesson is, as Mattioli reported, “the sort of targeting undertaken by Orbitz is likely to become more commonplace as online retailers scramble to identify new ways in which people’s browsing data can be used to boost online sales.  Orbitz lost $37 million in 2011 and its stock has fallen by more than 74% since its 2007 IPO.  The effort underscores how retailers are becoming bigger users of so-called predictive analytics, crunching reams of data to guess the future shopping habits of customers.  The goal is to tailor offerings to people believed to have the highest lifetime value to the retailer.”

The second lesson is a good example of how word of mouth has become word of data.  Shortly after the article was published, Orbitz became a trending topic on Twitter — but not in a way that the company would have hoped.  A lot of negative sentiment was expressed by Mac users claiming that they would no longer use Orbitz since they charged Mac users more than PC users.

However, this commonly expressed misunderstanding was clarified by an Orbitz spokesperson in the article, who explained that Orbitz is not charging Mac users more money for the same hotels, but instead they are simply setting the default search rank to show Mac users the more expensive hotels first.  Mac users can always re-sort the results ascending by price in order to see the same less expensive hotels that would be displayed in the default search rank used for PC users.  Orbitz is attempting to offer a customized (albeit a generalized, not personalized) user experience, but some users see it as gaming the system against them.

This Orbitz story provides two lessons about the brave new business world brought to us by big data and data science, where more companies are using predictive analytics to discover business insights, and more customers are empowering themselves with data.

Business has always resembled a battlefield.  But nowadays, data is the weapon of choice for companies and customers alike, since, in our increasing data-constructed world, big data is no longer just for big companies, and everyone is a data geek now.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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The Graystone Effects of Big Data

As a big data geek and a big fan of science fiction, I was intrigued by Zoe Graystone, the central character of the science fiction television show Caprica, which was a spin-off prequel of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television show.

Zoe Graystone was a teenage computer programming genius who created a virtual reality avatar of herself based on all of the available data about her own life, leveraging roughly 100 terabytes of personal data from numerous databases.  This allowed her avatar to access data from her medical files, DNA profiles, genetic typing, CAT scans, synaptic records, psychological evaluations, school records, emails, text messages, phone calls, audio and video recordings, security camera footage, talent shows, sports, restaurant bills, shopping receipts, online search history, music lists, movie tickets, and television shows.  The avatar transformed that big data into personality and memory, and believably mimicked the real Zoe Graystone within a virtual reality environment.

The best science fiction reveals just how thin the line is that separates imagination from reality.  Over thirty years ago, around the time of the original Battlestar Galactica television show, virtual reality avatars based on massive amounts of personal data would likely have been dismissed as pure fantasy.  But nowadays, during the era of big data and data science, the idea of Zoe Graystone creating a virtual reality avatar of herself doesn’t sound so far-fetched, nor is it pure data science fiction.

“On Facebook,” Ellis Hamburger recently blogged, “you’re the sum of all your interactions and photos with others.  Foursquare began its life as a way to see what your friends are up to, but it has quickly evolved into a life-logging tool / artificial intelligence that knows you like an old friend does.”

Facebook and Foursquare are just two social media examples of our increasingly data-constructed world, which is creating a virtual reality environment where our data has become our avatar and our digital mouths are speaking volumes about us.

Big data and real data science are enabling people and businesses of all sizes to put this virtual reality environment to good use, such as customers empowering themselves with data and companies using predictive analytics to discover business insights.

I refer to the positive aspects of Big Data as the Zoe Graystone Effect.

But there are also negative aspects to the virtual reality created by our big data avatars.  For example, in his recent blog post Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data, Quentin Hardy explained “by triangulating different sets of data (you are suddenly asking lots of people on LinkedIn for endorsements on you as a worker, and on Foursquare you seem to be checking in at midday near a competitor’s location), people can now conclude things about you (you’re probably interviewing for a job there).”

On the Caprica television show, Daniel Graystone (her father) used Zoe’s avatar as the basis for an operating system for a race of sentient machines known as Cylons, which ultimately lead to the Cylon Wars and the destruction of most of humanity.  A far less dramatic example from the real world, which I explained in my blog post The Data Cold War, is how companies like Google use the virtual reality created by our big data avatars against us by selling our personal data (albeit indirectly) to advertisers.

I refer to the negative aspects of Big Data as the Daniel Graystone Effect.

How have your personal life and your business activities been affected by the Graystone Effects of Big Data?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

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